Throwback Thursday: Zoo City Explores the Animal Nature of Cities

South Africa’s history of apartheid is invariably invoked in any discussion of the country. In Zoo City, Beukes gestures to that segregation in her central magic. There’s not a lot of explanation for why it happens, but at some point, in our near-future history, people who commit a crime resulting in the death of another, even peripherally, are granted (burdened with) with a animal familiar, and a talent for something peculiar. The animal is the sign of shame, the outward manifestation of internal sin (“Zoos” can’t be separated too far from their animals, or they’ll die; injuring one affects the other), and Beukes doesn’t spend too much time trying to world-build this happenstance into total coherence. No one knows why; it just happens.
It’s treated like a plague at first—the Zoo Plague—but it is not communicable, and clearly relies on magic. Beukes also explored the theme of the divided city in her debut novel, Moxyland. There, in a cyberpunk Capetown, she sketches out a corporatist dystopia, where the ruptures are technological, not magical, but the social divisions are just as strongly enforced and maintained. (Both books, first published by Angry Robot, are out in new trade paperback editions from Mulholland Books.)
I don’t know much about South Africa. I’ve seen the odd documentary. I was a kid when apartheid was breaking, so most of my info came from pop cultural moments like the Sun City boycotts: hey look, musicians!  I knew a guy from Jo’burg once, but I never really talked to him much, because he was determined to seduce a roommate of mine, to the detriment of my inquiries. I can’t say if Zoo City has anything to do with the real Johannesburg, whatever that is, but I am so enamored of the city Beukes lays out for me here: the afropop stars, the poor moving in from the out-country, the clubs, the suburbs, the refugees, the untranslated words from Afrikaans, the muti. The plot starts with the almost offhanded detective story that boils and boils into a paranoid plot that overflows, spilling over the societal registers and all across Johannesburg.

Zoo City is a first-person narrative, and our first person is a clear and ringing voice. Zinzi December, like many zoos, never lays out exactly what happened to result in her having a sloth on her back. She was a junkie; her brother died; she has no real connection to her former life, except that she now lives the opposite of it. She was a writer, she was a mover and shaker. Now she is nothing, using her talents to find lost things, when all she used to do was lose things. The metaphor of the animal isn’t drawn too tight, which is great; I kept trying to make it pigeonhole into a metaphor about race, or poverty, or apartheid in its barbed wire, but it kept slipping from me, going in odd directions, demanding to be seen from an angle other than the one I was looking from.
Zoo City is also about people managing their different crises and different public identities: a housewife who can hold her scorpion in her purse, passing as normal when she goes to fill out forms for the other people with animals; the afropop star who pretends to have an animal to build his street cred; the well-intentioned but infuriating saviors who come up to our protagonist and tell her that it’s okay to be animaled. Yup. ‘Cuz you know, kid. Maybe my pleasure is a kind of literary tourism, where I get to pretend I understand a city, a country, through some words on a page. But then, as urban fantasy, the fantastic elements are there to remind you that this is not Johannesburg, but a metaphorical representation, the city and its animal.
Zoo City and Moxyland are available now.